Thanksgiving Homily By Cardinal O’Brien

Thanksgiving Day
North American College
November 22, 2012
Cardinal Edwin F. O’Brien

The Thanksgiving days celebrated at our College probably remain among the most memorable in the hearts and minds of the members of our College community, past and present. I suspect all of you, but especially our new men will appreciate that at the end of this long and eventful day.

Regardless of how many years we have spent far from home on this day, it can be a difficult day, with recurring thoughts of warm, family Thanksgivings past. The turkey run, corridor breakfasts, spaghetti bowl and the banquet soon to follow all help to tide us over. Nor are they mere distractions, but rather important community moments enabling us to appreciate graces given us here every day for which, perhaps, we give too little daily thanks – new and deepened friendships within a healthy community life, spiritual and academic challenges with successes and failures, all of which enlarge our God-given horizons for growth in preparation for priesthood and in a deeper love and appreciation for America the Beautiful.

For unique in all the world, from its very earliest years, Thanksgiving has been America’s holy day, indeed a virtual holy day of obligation regardless of religious persuasion or ethnic background.

With due deference to our Australian and Canadian brothers who add so much to this gifted community, I must admit, on this day especially, to a certain national chauvinism. C.S. Lewis somewhere refers to a conversation with an old Anglican clergyman voicing pride in the superior glories of his beloved England. Lewis questions, “But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest, and its own women the fairest in the world?” The clergyman replied, with fatal gravity – he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar – “Yes, but in England it’s true.”

So may God forgive us if on this day only we voice a boastful devotion to America. We do so, convinced that despite our past and present national sins of racism, foreign oppression, materialism and consumerism among many other faults, “America, God has shed His grace on thee”. And for this grace, on this day, we give thanks, we express our gratitude. Thanks and gratitude flow from the realization that we have been given something undeserved, a totally unmerited, gift, for in spite of our many and continuing sins and shortcomings, God continues to bless us and for that we given thanks, this day, to God.

Thanks go God. Increasingly, in our rapidly expanding secularized culture, many Americans – and we see it in today’s media – give thanks to a blank on this Thanksgiving Day. A floating thanks, directed particularly to nowhere, to no one, fearing perhaps that any mention of God would be un-American, divisive in a pluralistic society. Those Presidents over the centuries who have called for this day to be celebrated, evidence no such reluctance.

Virtually every president since George Washington in proclaiming this a National Holiday has called for prayerful thanks to God on this day. The list, of course is long and I cite but two of our most beloved leaders. Our first President in 1789 called this Nation to “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer” for its “many single favors” from Almighty God.

Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, no less – proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be a “day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the Heavens” and called on all Americans, including those at sea and in foreign lands to celebrate this day.

And, indeed, as this day does find all of us in a foreign (and very hospitable) land, but might we not be well aware that our prayers of thanksgiving are at least as powerful, uplifted from here, within the See of Peter, as they would be from our own local churches. We are one in prayer with each of our local churches, not only in thanksgiving, but certainly in petition that the freedoms we have traditionally enjoyed as Catholics in today’s modern America will not be stifled in the immediate years ahead.

A remarkable, most unusual claim do we hear in the Preface of today’s liturgy – a preface itself a Thanksgiving prayer addressed to the Father through Christ our Lord: “You have entrusted to us the great gift of freedom, a freedom that calls forth responsibility and commitment to the truth that all have a fundamental dignity before you.”

We all know that the great gift of America’s freedom is suddenly under siege – freedom of religion, to carry out our Church’s works of healthcare, charity and education unshackled from paralyzing governmental hindrance, freedom to effectively protect the fundamental dignity of the weakest among us, freedom to exercise responsible conscience in protecting marriage and family integrity.

One hundred twenty-five years ago, preaching from the pulpt of his newly appointed titular church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the then Archbishop of Baltimore and first American Cardinal, James Gibbons utters these words: “For myself, as a citizen of the United States, without closing my eyes to our defects as a nation, I proclaim, with a deep sense of pride and gratitude, and in this great capital of Christendom, that I belong to a country where the civil government holds over us the aegis of its protection without interfering in the legitimate exercise of our sublime mission as ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

What better prayer can we offer on behalf of our nation during this Thanksgiving Eucharist, than that Cardinal Gibbons’ patriotic boast will ring true in America’s days and years to come.